Florida’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities Address Racial Disparities Within the Criminal Justice System Using Results-Based Accountability

• Author: Randy B. Nelson,Felecia Dix-Richardson,Kideste Yusef
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368718808345
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Race and Justice
2019, Vol. 9(1) 22-45
Florida’s Historically Black
ª The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/2153368718808345
Address Racial Disparities
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Within the Criminal Justice
System Using Results-
Based Accountability
Kideste Yusef1, Randy B. Nelson1,
and Felecia Dix-Richardson2
Abstract
The current climate of criminal justice agencies reveals eroding community trust of
local police advanced by growing attention to violence among police and citizens,
differential justice in our courts, limited governmental accountability, and decades of
overreliance on the correctional system and the mass incarceration of our most
vulnerable citizens. The policies and practices of criminal justice agencies coupled with
the conditions in which many Americans live have contributed to an over-
representation of African Americans/Blacks within police interactions and arrests, in
courts and sentencing, corrections, and juvenile justice. Similarly, the under-
representation of African American/Blacks as practitioners and workers within these
agencies have yielded a dichotomized view in which African Americans represent “the
most of the worst and least of the best.” In effort to reverse these trends, the Florida
Historically Black Colleges and Universities Expanding the Bench Project utilizes the
consortium of Florida’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (FL HBCUs) as an
effective mechanism to educate and train criminal justice, sociology, social work,
education, psychology, and STEM science faculty and students on performance
management using the Results-Based Accountability framework. The purpose of the
Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored project is to increase the representation of
people of color with knowledge and expertise in program evaluation. With
1 Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, FL, USA
2 Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kideste Yusef, Bethune-Cookman University, 640 Mary McLeod Bethune Blvd., Daytona Beach, FL 32114,
USA.
Email: yusefk@cookman.edu

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Yusef et al.
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approximately 3,000 students (undergraduate/graduate) and 30þ faculty members
represented among the social, education, and behavioral science disciplines of FL
HBCUs, the consortium is uniquely positioned to develop and train current and future
human service professionals, leaders, and experts in Florida and nationally.
Keywords
results-based accountability, race and juvenile justice, race and corrections, race and
policing, racial disparities
As a new year approaches, we acknowledge our place within a criminal justice
interregnum: caught between calls for systemic reform of America’s police, courts,
correctional, and juvenile justice systems and correspondent efforts to stifle pro-
gressive gains toward maintaining the status quo. The tumultuous nature of the pre-
vious decade sheds light on a growing number of criminal justice challenges. Some of
these include increased police–community tensions deepened by high levels of
scrutiny and distrust within minority communities and the Black community, in
particular disproportionate minority contact (DMC) and confinement within the
juvenile justice system and racial disparities in sentencing which sent more Black and
brown citizens to private prisons. These historic and new challenges necessitate the
application of a new way of thinking and taking action designed to improve the quality
of life of citizens in communities, cities, counties, states, and nations.
Results-Based Accountability (RBA) is a data-driven, disciplined way of thinking
and process that begins with an end condition of well-being and works backward
toward the means (Freidman, 2005/2015). The RBA model centers on two main
principles: population accountability and performance accountability. Population
accountability addresses the wellness of an entire population using indicators or
benchmarks to quantify achievement of the desire result. Narrowing focus to the
service delivery level, performance accountability measures how well a program,
service, or agency is performing by answering three key questions: How much did we
do?, How well did we do it?, and Is anyone better off? RBA provides seven talk-to-
action questions for each type of accountability.
The first section of this article evaluates current criminal and juvenile justice
practices by highlighting the issues associated with disproportionate minority repre-
sentation across each sector of these systems. Next, the authors present national data
trends as well as statistics within the state of Florida and related research to explain the
story behind these figures. The article concludes with a focus on population
accountability outlining how RBA is being applied in Florida toward the creation of a
fair and impartial criminal justice system for all Floridians.
In an effort to address the implications of a less than equitable criminal justice
system and to increase the representation of people of color with knowledge and
expertise in program evaluation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored the Florida
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) Expanding the Bench Project,

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Race and Justice 9(1)
which utilizes the consortium of Florida’s Historically Black Colleges and Uni-
versities (FL HBCUs) as an effective mechanism to educate and train criminal justice,
sociology, social work, education, psychology, and science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics faculty and students on performance management using the RBA
framework. As many FL HBCUs students and faculty share similar backgrounds with
youth and families served by Florida’s delinquency and dependency systems and other
criminal justice agencies, and many graduates comprise a large segment of the human
services workforce across Florida, it is our goal to establish a statewide network of
human service professionals who are positioned to advocate for an effective and
results-oriented human services delivery system throughout the state.
Problem Statement
Criminal justice policies and practices together with the conditions in which many
Americans live and work contribute to the disproportionate presence of African
Americans throughout each stage of the criminal justice and juvenile justice systems.
By the same token, an underrepresentation of African Americans as practitioners and
workers within these agencies offer a dichotomized view in which Blacks reflect “the
most of the worst and least of the best.” The “most of the worst”1 perspective speaks to
the grave disproportionality of African American overrepresentation among the most
troubling quality of life indicators. Some key measures of group well-being are work–
life balance, birth rate, education, and skills including benchmark reading scores and
high school graduation rates, teen pregnancy, and income, wealth, jobs, and earnings.
According to 2017 figures presented in the Annie E. Casey Race for Results index,
African American children had the lowest composite index score among 12 selected
social indicators, followed by American Indian and Latino youth. The authors of this
report cite the case of African American children, representing 14% of American
youth, as a national crisis, with Black youth in Southern states ranked among the
lowest nationally (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2017). Within the juvenile justice and
criminal justice systems, African American youth and adults are overrepresented
among citizens who experience negative police–citizen contacts including incidents
of nonfatal, excessive, and fatal force. This same pattern occurs among those arrested,
transferred to adult courts, and is reflected in disparate sentencing, and among those
confined. Data have consistently shown that the representation of Blacks in the
criminal justice and juvenile justice systems, from arrest to incarceration, far exceeds
their representation of the general population on the national level and within the state
of Florida (Alexander, 2010).
In contrast, the “least of the best” viewpoint reflects stark underrepresentation of
African Americans across positive social indicators including economic and
employment sectors. For instance, according to Forbes magazine, the median family
income of the typical White household in 2011 was US$111,146 compared to a mere
US$7,113 for Black families and US$8,348 for Latino households (Shin, 2015).
Furthermore, the Pew Research Center reports “the current gap between Blacks and
Whites has reached its highest point since 1989, when Whites had 17 times the wealth

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of Black households” (Kochhar & Fry, 2014, para. 3). Coates (2014) outlines how
governmental policy including land retraction; mortgage-housing restrictions, red-
lining, and historic discrimination contribute to current racial wealth disparities as
Black families across all income levels are essentially working without a financial
safety net. Racial disparities in income and wealth are so stark that Coates (2014)
underscores how African Americans who make US$100,000 yearly live in the same
type of neighborhoods as European Americans who make US$30,000. Toward illu-
minating “the most of the worst” and “least of the best” dichotomy, the following
section presents service system performance measures and population indicators
contrasting racial disparities of offenders and victims to racial disparities among
service practitioners within the criminal and juvenile justice systems.
Racial...